What are the "schools" of photography? e.g. american tradition vs....

I've heard some others talking of different schools of photography. For example the american or the european or even Finnish or (more literally) the Bauhaus etc.

I was hoping people would pitch in with various ideas about which photographers best represent these traditions and pretty much just help me understand better this idea in general.

So far I know the work of a lot of BW photographers (Bresson, Man Ray, Strand, Adams, Kertesz, Weston, Atget, Steiglitz, Cameron etc.) and understand photography's history in relation to modernism, but don't quite understand who makes up what traditions and "schools" that people have mentioned and how to then even identify photography to belong in a certain school.

I'm also interested in how this develops in later periods and colour photography.

Thanks

I have read this

https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/schools-of-photography-not-rit.12670/

But I've mainly heard the term "School" used in relation the countries rather than art movements so am interested in explanations around this.

hi crumpet8
i think when they talk about a certain "school" they mean a group of people who had a certain aesthetic or compositional interests &c.
in nyc in the 50s there were a group of abstract expressionist painters ( and aaron siskind ) loosley bound by subject matter and style called the new york school.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_School_(art)
these days i don't know if anyone does that sort of thing, although on some social media sites there are "groups" with a variety of different people with similar interests
who post in the same group. its not a small thing anymore, because of the web these schools are transnational &c ..

not sure if i answered anything you asked, sorry about that.

See David Vestal's take

http://theonlinephotographer.typepa...er/2013/12/david-vestal-a-wonderful-life.html

"The Whole Photography Chart"

Perhaps the idea of "schools" originates before photography in painting drawing and sculpture. Sometimes a work bears a recognizable style or theme or both that is associated with one particular master, but the work may not meet the criteria for being attributed to the original master and may be attributed to one of the students in the school of the master. The work is then given a caption "school of XYZ".

I think this idea of styles and themes that can be traced to a single originator applies in photography also and so too does the "school of..." idea because many photographers were also teachers.

Photography flourished everywhere in the twentieth century, every country had their masters and schools.

In the English speaking world American voices and pictures are often the "loudest" and sometimes may reach the furthest into other cultures making it seem that American work is more popular or superior in certain ways when all that is really happening is the work of market forces in picture publishing and promotion.

There is commercial photography and there is "fine art" photography, the difference being that people get paid for commercial photography whereas "fine art photography" is a financial burden on the photographer (except for a very few).

In the history of "fine art photography" the story behind the limited circulation publication "Camera Work", produced largely by the efforts of Steiglitz in New York, is interesting reading, there is an article at wikipedia on the subject https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_Work

Probably individuals in every country worked to produce similar photography publications, some survived, others disappeared without trace. Camera Work seems to appear in many histories of photography rather like an old chestnut. It was a tiny operation but left a long trail.

crumpet8 said:

I have read this

https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/schools-of-photography-not-rit.12670/

But I've mainly heard the term "School" used in relation the countries rather than art movements so am interested in explanations around this.

Click to expand...

-) "School" is used in both meanings (institution/building and style) in some languages.

-) If a style is congruent over a country then the country name is used (e.g. flemish school).

The "Düsseldorf School"

The Düsseldorf school of photography https://www.artsy.net/gene/dusseldorf-school-of-photography
https://www.artsy.net/gene/dusseldorf-school-of-photography
There was a Düsseldorf school of painting too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Düsseldorf_school_of_painting

Basically a school in the meaning of style can be traced back to one studio, academy, teacher, or place (artists community). That explains the term.

With the Düsseldorf School (in the photographic meaning), to my understanding it still only refers to the students of the Becher couple, or students of students of them who follow their style.

Some Becher students (Ruff, Gursky) dont follow the Becher style today.

--

link to video removed because of paid content - sorry !

Ah thanks everyone! I get it a bit more now then.

It is just a tag. For making life more easy. And that is ok for me.

crumpet8 said:

I've heard some others talking of different schools of photography. For example the american or the european or even Finnish or (more literally) the Bauhaus etc.

I was hoping people would pitch in with various ideas about which photographers best represent these traditions and pretty much just help me understand better this idea in general.

So far I know the work of a lot of BW photographers (Bresson, Man Ray, Strand, Adams, Kertesz, Weston, Atget, Steiglitz, Cameron etc.) and understand photography's history in relation to modernism, but don't quite understand who makes up what traditions and "schools" that people have mentioned and how to then even identify photography to belong in a certain school.

I'm also interested in how this develops in later periods and colour photography.

Thanks

Click to expand...

School in your concern is coming from a Master of Art. He always teach others and give basis and direction of his style and methods.
There is no need of a course you can follow such style by yourself.
If you have a group of followers in some countrys over a long or a remarqable period it may chance to a countrys name school.
Turner is such guy who formed an american school in painting.
So if you are using the term american school in regard of landscape painting it is often meant "a Turner like style"
A gerneral "american school" in photography isn't existing from my point.
Too much unprecise/too many different styles.
"New color photography" "bw landscape 40-60" "national geographic in color" will help for example.
So you have to decide between many many diferent "american schools.
with regards

trendland said:

School in your concern is coming from a Master of Art. He always teach others and give basis and direction of his style and methods.
There is no need of a course you can follow such style by yourself.
If you have a group of followers in some countrys over a long or a remarqable period it may chance to a countrys name school.
Turner is such guy who formed an american school in painting.
So if you are using the term american school in regard of landscape painting it is often meant "a Turner like style"
A gerneral "american school" in photography isn't existing from my point.
Too much unprecise/too many different styles.
"New color photography" "bw landscape 40-60" "national geographic in color" will help for example.
So you have to decide between many many diferent "american schools.
with regards

Click to expand...

Thanks Trendland

Earlier last century, there were 2 competing schools - the Pictorialists (New York based but also more international led by Stieglitz and his Photosecession movement) and the f/64 folks (west coast based mostly landscape photographers such as Adams, Weston and the like.) Lots of wiki stuff on these topics.

I would say, in some ways these two distinctions are still in existence today.

The two distinctions were baked into Photography with the Daguerreotype and the Calotype competing. It is possible to see the principles of all of the future interpretations as off shoots of that non identical twin birth. The Daguerreotype sharp and detailed was prevalent until the Wet plate replaced it but as a School the sharp school continued through dry plate. Then the Art Photography and the Naturalist photography schools debated, merging into the sessionist and pictorialist schools. The straight photography of the 1920's was a restatement of the Daguerreotype principles and this morphed into the Modernist school. To which we might add the German documentary school of the 1920's news media and the Neue Sachlichkeit. F64 was a very short lived take on straight photography. Modernism morphed into post modernism. I don't know what we have now with the interest in detail combined with manipulation, maybe a combined Calo/daguerreotype phase of digital photography.